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Dietary fats are important, but we rarely hear about them… what gives? Well today, that’s exactly what we are going to be discussing. More specifically how you can support the anabolic process through diet & dietary fats.
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Mary:
Hello, welcome everyone. Today we’re going to talk about something that’s really important and yet, I feel like maybe is gaining traction in recent years with how important it is, but it’s still maybe not talked about as much. Especially when it comes to dieting and diet culture, because it can have some severe consequences if we are not paying attention to it.
Kristin:
Yeah. We’re going to talk about dietary fats and their ability to alter your anabolic hormone signaling. And we talk a lot in the nutrition world, especially in the sports nutrition world, about protein and carbohydrates. Those get all of everyone’s attention. And I’m guilty of this too, not talking about fats quite as much, and they are actually super, super important. So, we’re gonna talk about them and how they actually can improve or worsen your anabolic hormone signaling in your body. Which we know anabolic hormones in our bodies are natural. Anabolic hormones help make us stronger. We need them for a lot of things.
Mary:
We get them for a lot. We’ll get into that. But first, like what, so fat that we eat is made up of what are called fatty acids on the molecular structure and this molecule that’s cholesterol. Cholesterol can be altered and in the body, your body takes it in, it takes cholesterol, it takes away a few things. It adds a few things and it creates different hormones. And that can happen from either fat you intake, and your liver actually makes quite a few of these cholesterol hormones. So, there is a mixture of both, but you need your dietary fats, those stuff that you eat, to make some different anabolic hormones and other hormones. But you also have your body making them. So it’s a mixture of both, but you need both in order to be at a hundred.
Remember how we talked about how recovery is made up of sleep and nutrition, and maybe a tiny, tiny bit of other things, but the majority of it is sleep and nutrition, and it has to equal 100%? The same thing happens with your liver making cholesterol and your intake of cholesterol. You need both to have a sufficient amount of different hormones in the body,
Kristin:
Correct. You couldn’t just rely on your liver to create it.
Mary:
Which we’ll get into because that’s going to be a problem.
Kristin:
Right. Right. Yeah. So, let’s talk about the range of fats that people should be in, because this is again, we talk about protein and how much protein everyone needs and how carbohydrates are really important, but like how much fat are we supposed to eat? No one really knows. So in an isocaloric state, meaning you are basically eating at maintenance, that’s what we call maintenance, right? You are eating sufficient calories to fuel your everyday activities and to fuel your training. You are not really gaining weight or losing weight. You are just eating at what’s called your TDEE, your total daily energy expenditure. So when you are in that isocaloric state, you want to be around 20 to 30% of your caloric intake coming from dietary fats. That’s what’s optimal for hormone signaling.
Mary:
And we talked about this in other episodes where if we were to calculate it, not just necessarily percentage wise, it would come out to be roughly 1 gram per kilogram of body weight.
Kirstin:
Between 0.8 to 1 gram. Yup. Yup. Which, see. Now, depending on the amount of calories you consume. Say for instance, you had really impaired metabolism and maybe you’re working on reverse dieting or whatever. Maybe that number, if you go off of body weight, that number might be a little bit off or vice versa. If you train really hard and have an awesome metabolism and you’re eating 3,500 calories a day, then that might be a little off too. But yeah. So either 0.8 to 1 gram per kilogram or 20 to 30% of your caloric intake.
Mary:
Yeah. And remember like, guys, this is all just generalized. Research is generalized. It’s taking an average, it’s looking at all these different people. Rarely does it look at female strength athlete so everything that we talk about is an average in general, but this is why having someone who really knows what they’re talking about, a nutrition coach on your side who can look at your diet and be like, “Hey, we need to change things” is so, so important.
Kristin:
Very. Yeah. So the reason why they don’t list…So, okay. I think the question then is if 20 to 30% of your caloric intake coming from fats is a good place to be, is more better? Or is more harmful? And the answer to that really…well, when we’re talking about an athletic population, so people that train hard, carbohydrates are the fuel substrate that your body prefers for energy. If you increase your fat intake and you’re in an isocaloric state, you’ve got to decrease something else, right? So, either protein, which I don’t recommend, unless you’re eating extremely high amounts of protein and then you’d get like no carbs. You want to balance things out so that your carbohydrates are available for fuel, right?
If you lower them too much, then you are not going to have an appropriate reaction in your body from training. You’re not going to be able to train hard enough really to get ample amounts of muscle protein synthesis. So, while fats are really important in terms of our anabolic hormone signaling, we have to be able to have the training stimulus, which carbohydrates are going to help provide to us in order to activate that muscle protein synthesis. It’s really a balancing act.
Mary:
Really, truly. We talked about this in our recomp episode forever ago about eating at maintenance and the reason your body is able to change and does change is because you’re able to push harder in training and stimulate that muscle protein synthesis. And that comes from fueling your body properly. So this is why carbs, aside from training, your brain prefers carbs. Most of your carb energy goes to get in your brain a-movin. And without it, you probably experience a lot of brain fog. This is why people in dieting. And we’ve talked about this, something in dieting that happens if you are in a severe caloric deficit, if you’re in a severe deficit, you’re gonna start experiencing brain fog because you just simply don’t have the energy to go around.
Kristin:
For sure. I think probably everyone has experienced that. I remember way back in the 90s when Atkins was really popular…Mary’s laughing cause she was a baby.
Mary:
My mom did Atkins.
Kristin:
I think everyone’s mom did Atkins. Like my whole family did Atkins. And your brain does not work so well on that, at least in the beginning.
So speaking of caloric deficit, there are times like when we are in a caloric deficit, when we can decrease our dietary fat percentage because we want to keep carbohydrates as high as possible when you’re in a caloric deficit. The last thing we want to happen is to lose strength and not have energy to go to the gym because then what the heck was the point? So we want to keep carbohydrates as high as possible. So a lot of times reductions in during a diet come from fats. So lowering them to like 15 to 20% would be okay during a dieting phase, but you cannot live there. You can’t live there forever. We’re talking about short term decrease. And then either reverse dieting or just going back into maintenance and increasing them to the 20 to 30% range.
Mary:
Yeah. You do not want to be living your life in there for reasons we’ll get into.
Kristin:
Well, yeah, no, let’s get into them right now. What happens when you keep your fat intake too low? So what’s considered a very low fat diet is 10% of your caloric intake. It alters your body’s anabolic hormone signaling. Your hormones are going to decrease the free circulating amount of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone is going to decrease, which is not good. We need all of those hormones for a lot of different things, but particularly as strength athletes, we need them for strength.
Mary:
And so if you are reducing, if you have that amount of fat intake, not only will you be experiencing a reduction in that, which means the reduction in your athletic potential, you’re going to experience a reduction in overall health because those things are so important – vital – to your health as a human person.
Kristin:
We’re talking about bone health, brain health, all of that.
Mary:
And for women, our reproductive health. Whether or not we want to have children, that’s really important for us to be. It’s our health report card. If our report card isn’t showing up great, then we got to fix something.
Kristin:
Absolutely. Yeah. So, staying on a very low fat diet for a long period of time can really mess up your hormones.
Mary:
I mean, even…unless you’re doing it for….and I do not condone this behavior, but let’s just say this. If you’re doing it for a couple days to maybe make weight, that’s one thing. If you’re doing it for longer periods of time, that’s an issue. I do not condone cutting that much fat out of your diet to make a weight. At that point, you really need to be reconsidering what weight class you’re in cause that’s just unhealthy. You’re going to feel so shitty. Yeah.
Kristin:
Unless you’re at the world level and then lifting is your job and all of that.
Mary:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s going to be circumstances for it. But for the average people like us, it’s not worth it. It’s not worth it.
Kristin:
I’m shaking my head. No, no, no.
Mary:
No. And so like we see a lot of plans or ways of life that really rely on people…they’re mostly like weight loss things, that rely on people having really, really low fat diets. And you’re like, how do people live like that? And the thing is they don’t. Typically what you see with someone who does that they’ll be able to go like a week or maybe a few days on this really, really low fat diet and their body’s going to send them like panic signals and they’ll end up bingeing on really highly fatty foods in order to bring themselves back up.
Kristin:
Or they just ignore those signals and end up having to have hormone replacement therapy because their hormones are so screwed up.
Mary:
Yup. It’s a really big deal. It’s a really big issue that it’s not talked about too, too much in this industry. And it needs to be because it primarily affects us women.
Kristin:
Yeah. I mean, but in men too, it’s going to decrease testosterone to a point that’s going to make them probably feel really lethargic as well as make it really difficult to build lean muscle – and affect their strength. So yeah. Overall not good.
And I think that there’s some weird vibes out there. I don’t know what else to call it other than vibes. There are some weird thoughts out there that our hormones can’t be changed through our nutrition, but 100% they can be and they are greatly affected by our nutrition. So, if you are listening to this and you’ve been in a really, really low-fat state for a long time, just increase your fat intake. And I bet you, you will feel a lot better very quickly. And then over the course of six months to a year, I think that you can probably recapture whatever health issues you had come up based on that. And a lot of times people aren’t even aware that that’s what’s causing their health issues. That’s why they have low testosterone or low estrogen or low progesterone.
Mary:
And a lot of…Oh no, you go.
Kristin:
I was just gonna say, and this is the case where a lot of times we’ll see people purchase nutrition courses or templates or whatever. I mean, we have nutrition courses out there and people will do a dieting phase without the understanding that you can’t stay there and live there. And so I have seen that happen when people are like, “Well, I did this diet and then my weight kind of plateaued. So I just stayed at those calories forever.” And now we have some issues with metabolism and health because of being on a really low calorie diet that was never intended for them to stay on for a long time.
Mary:
No, and that’s when we get people coming to us saying, “I’m so frustrated, I either can’t lose weight or I gained a lot of weight and I don’t understand why.” And you look at what they have been doing and you’re like, “Right, because you’re eating a thousand calories a day.” And if you eat a 1,001 calories a day, your body’s just going to, its metabolism is so slow. It’s just going to store that extra calorie like that. There is no inefficiency there.
Kristin:
Right. The proper thing to do is to do a dieting phase and then either, depending on the length of time of the diet and your history with dieting, either do a reverse diet or just go back into maintenance. You have to spend some time, you have to do like a post diet diet. You can’t just say, I dieted and I’m going to stay here or I dieted and I’m going to go back to the way I was eating because that’s also not going to work – if you have lost weight, especially if you’ve lost a significant amount of weight…
Mary:
Everything is different.
Kristin:
Yeah, everything has decreased. That’s that’s the whole point, right? A smaller person has a lower metabolism than a bigger person in terms of body mass. And then let alone the metabolic adaptations that occur through being in a caloric deficit. So you kind of have a double whammy. You can’t just go back to the way you were eating. There has to be some changes. This is why you should work with a nutrition coach because they know all of this and they can make it so that you are successful in keeping the weight off that you have lost.
Mary:
We’re repairing your metabolism in general. Like, I also really have to laugh going back to something you said that, “we can’t change our hormones from eating food.” Like, do you know the way that we change things in our body is primarily by what we eat? So many things in your body change based on what your diet is. Things in your brain, your brain chemistry, your gut microbiome will be changed very rapidly from what you eat. It’s within 24 hours, we see a difference based on what your diet is. And so people who say that your hormones can’t be changed…I just, I can’t, I can’t even. Obviously they think that they’re qualified, but they’re not because we change everything from what we eat.
Kristin:
Insulin is changed by every meal that you eat.
Mary:
And we can influence insulin by insulin shots, you know. We can alter our sex hormones by taking birth control. That will alter all of our sex hormones.
Kristin:
Definitely.
Mary:
So everything can be changed and manipulated. I think the problem is, you know, maybe we don’t necessarily want to get into this, but there’s a lot of bullying in the industry of like, “I know better. I’m an expert here.” And we forget that even though there is generally a right way to do things, sometimes there’s two sides of the coin where one approach is accepted by A community, and one approach is accepted by B community, but both communities have some scientific backing of what’s going on. That’s why medicine and all this as a practice because we’re learning. And instead of just shutting it down, the people who don’t take time to maybe think like, “Hey, maybe this could be a thing. Why don’t we run some trials? Why don’t we have evidence?” I always have to laugh. It’s like, we’re the scientists trying to learn. If there is evidence to suggest that this other way potentially is correct, wouldn’t you as a scientist, want to look into that?
Kristin:
I think…well, right. I think that it’s our job to look at the full picture.
Mary:
Yep.
Kristin:
And sometimes people are very biased and they choose not to look at the full picture. And so, I mean, and all scientists have a bias. Everyone has a bias. Your job in the scientific community is to try to be as unbiased as possible.
Mary:
Yep. So let’s talk about good sources of fat because not all fats are equal, right? Everyone’s probably heard that you should avoid trans fats, which are in a lot of processed foods and I agree with that wholeheartedly. That’s not, when we talk about the ability of fats to alter your anabolic hormone signaling, we’re not talking about eating any source of fat. You want to avoid trans fats, but one type of fat that is really, really good is polyunsaturated fats. And those typically come from plants. So avocados. Mary’s like, YES, PLANTS! Avocados and nuts and seeds and things like that. But also fish is another really good source of polyunsaturated fats. So those are where you want a lot of your fats to come from. So extra Virgin olive oil, olives, even whole eggs are really good. Free range eggs have a really good fat profile. Dark chocolate actually is a pretty good source of fat. That’s my favorite. I am hooked on this sea salt dark chocolate from Aldi lately. I can’t get enough of it.
Mary:
I remember I found my mom’s stash of dark chocolate in the freezer when I was little. And I was like, “Oh, chocolate!!” And I had it and I bout puked. It was not good.
Kristin:
No kid likes dark chocolate. I think that that’s like, that’s an acquired taste later in life.
Mary:
Is this the same thing as beer? Because beer is disgusting. I don’t understand anyone who likes beer. It doesn’t make sense to me. Like, it tastes like butt. Why do you, why do you lie to yourself and pretend that it tastes good? It does not. You’re laughing because it’s true.
Kristin:
Well, I can’t drink beer. I haven’t because I have celiac disease, but I’ve had gluten-free beer. That’s pretty darn good. I wish I could drink beer. I liked the taste of beer. I mean, like good craft beer.
Mary:
It does not compute. I don’t understand. Okay. So, let’s talk about some bad sources of fat. Some are not ideal.
Kristin:
Basically any processed source of fat. So like baked goods.
Mary:
Oh no.
Kristin:
Well, if you make it yourself, when you use good fats, that’s okay. But like buying it from a store, you know those Twinkies…gross. Things that are really shelf stable, probably want to avoid pre-packaged muffins and cookies and that kind of stuff. Make it yourself, use good ingredients. Yeah. Cakes, any, anything. Chips, all that stuff. What are others? I don’t eat this stuff. So I don’t even, they don’t even come to mind.
Mary:
You’re spot on. I mean, the more processed it is, the worse it’s going to be for you. Now, does that mean you don’t eat that stuff? No, of course not. But don’t make it your whole diet.
Kristin:
Don’t say, “Mary and Kristen told me I need to eat fat, so I’m going to eat Twinkies.”
Mary:
Yeah, don’t do that. You can have a Twinkie, but also make sure that you’re eating things like eggs and avocados and things that are actually good for you. We’re not giving you a hall pass to just eat processed food.
Kristin:
Right. Also supplementing with fish oil would be a great way to get more healthy fats into your diet if you do fish. You supplement with, you don’t use fish oil.
Mary:
Flaxseed oil. Yup. And you can get that in pill form.
Kristin:
Awesome. Also, if you just get a bunch of flax seeds and grind them in a coffee grinder and throw them in a smoothie that is an excellent source of fat.
The main issue with fats and where they come from in your food sources is that the trans fats are what make foods that are preserved, shelf stable. It’s just not good fat for you. It’s not going to do anything to help improve your hormones. If anything, it may hinder your hormones.
Mary:
Right. Remember when I said, the reason that we take in fats is because we can get that backbone, that cholesterol out and use it to make other things. With the trans fats, it is very difficult for your body, almost impossible for your body to actually break down those fats because of their molecular structure. That’s why they’re so stable. They’re too stable. We can’t break them down so we don’t use them. So you could be having a pretty high-fat diet, but still have really unregulated hormones because you’re not taking in good fats. Right? So, that’s why we don’t want the trans fats.
Now the polyunsaturated or even saturated fats, they’re not as good as polyunsaturated, but they’re still better than trans fats. Your body can better, more easily break that down. It has the components, the molecules, the enzymes that can break that down easily. Whereas trans fats, because they help with stability. They’re so stable that we just can’t, we can’t do it.
Kristin:
Yeah. If something doesn’t go bad on your counter in a matter of days, your body can’t break it down very well either.
Mary:
If it can live on your shelf for months, it’s not for you.
Kristin:
Right. Unless it’s canned, but yeah.
Mary:
Different story.
Kristin:
Different story. Okay. So let’s talk about what this actually looks like in practice. So we’re talking about 20 to 30% of your calories coming from fat. And so remember that as athletes, we want to avoid fat surrounding training because fats, while they are really good for us, they slow down the digestion of everything you eat with them. Which is great for maintaining stable blood sugar throughout the day. Not so great when you’re going to go to training and you need to use the energy from the food that you just ate. So, you’re going to be avoiding fat surrounding your training, which means you’re probably going to have a couple of meals that are either low fat or no fat in a couple of meals then that are really high fat.
So I just started a reverse diet and my fats are higher than they’ve been in a long time. And I’m scratching my head like, “Oh my gosh, okay. I need four eggs for breakfast, like cooked in butter and some peanut butter” because I train in the middle of the day, I train at say two or three. So I have a lot of fats in my breakfast. I don’t really have any fats after breakfast or my pre-training meal or my post-training meal, and then I have dinner and I have a lot of fats available for that. So, that’s kind of how that works in practice. If you train first thing in the morning, then you’re just going to avoid fats after your training. And then you’ve got all your fats to use from like, you know, mid-day to end of day. And vice versa if you train at night – you’re going to have all your fats front-loaded in your day.
Mary:
And in general for your post training, this happens to a lot of people. It’s happened to Kristen and I, but we’ll eat our post-training meal and we’ll have low to no fat. And about an hour after we finish, we will be hungry again, nearly starving.
Kristin:
Yeah because you have really quick-digesting protein and carbohydrates to jumpstart recovery. And now your body’s like, “hello! That didn’t last me very long. Feed me now.”
Mary:
Correct. So I have a lot of clients ask me like, is it okay for me to eat at that point? And the answer is yes, absolutely.
Kristin:
You should. You should eat at that point.
Mary:
You’ve given your body what it needs to recover. It’s processed that, it has worked through that. Now it needs something else in order to kind of slow things down to level out. So feed it and you can feed it a fatty meal after that point, but just try to avoid it right after training.
Now there’s not going to be perfect days for my intuitive eaters for people who may be, or who are in a rush one day, there may be a day where you have a higher fat post-training meal. And that is what it is. It’s not going to be the worst thing. It’s definitely not the best thing. It’s not the worst thing. If that’s your only option is to eat something with fat or to go hungry until like three hours later when you have access to food, again, just eat the thing with the fat. It’s okay. It’s better than nothing
Kristin:
For sure. It’s one of those things where we talk about consistency all the time, what you do most of the time matters way more than what you do some of the time. So, if once in a while like in my case, I really need to go to the grocery store because I’m out of some carbs sources that I’m used to having pre or post training. I don’t exactly know what I’m going to do about that today until I have time to go to the store, but it’s not one day isn’t going to make a huge difference. Is it ideal? No, but that’s life.
Mary:
It’s one day.
Kristin:
It’s one day. It’s okay. If I was doing that consistently, if I consistently either wasn’t eating right after training or was having a really high fat meal right after training, that’s probably not a good strategy. And I probably need to look at changing that.
Mary:
Some of you guys you may be thinking, well, I work out after work. Like I go home and eat dinner with my family. What I always recommend is to bring yourself some Gatorade and some protein powder. I always recommend some type of vanilla or unflavored, mix it with the Gatorade powder and drink it on your way home. Most of you have at least maybe a 10 to 20 minute drive home from the gym. If you’re working out at home and you’re in your basement, you probably have enough time with even 30 minutes to drink a serving of Gatorade and protein powder. And that’ll be enough so that when you sit down for dinner, you can actually eat the food and whatever.
Don’t let little logistics like that derail you. I mean, there’s a way around everything. Just planning a little bit better I think is what really most of us need to do instead of just reacting. We need to be proactive in our life. So something like that, something really simple: Gatorade and protein powder. Fill it up on your way out, drink it on your way home. Good, done, over with.
Kristin:
Done. Love it. Perfect. And that really makes us, leads us into this idea of knowing yourself, knowing your schedule, and figuring out what you can do to best fit your schedule and make things as ideal as possible. You simply might have a schedule where you’re not going to be able to get things perfect, like ever. It might just be that way. That might just be how your day is laid out. You can work at it. You can look at it and you can constantly try to tweak things. But don’t let that, don’t just throw in the towel and say, “Well, I can’t do any of this stuff, right? So I’m not even going to try.”
Do the things you can do and don’t worry about the rest, but constantly be assessing your life and your schedule to see how you can make things more optimal. If your goal is to get stronger and be healthy and compete or whatever your goals are.
Mary:
And going back to what we’ve talked about a million times, you can’t look at someone on social media who seems to have it all together and one, and try to build your life the exact same way that they do it on a single day. Remember everything in your life you have to build piece by piece. So it starts with whatever your foundation is. And you just keep adding bricks, and maybe some bricks don’t fit and you have to take them back out and you have to find different bricks that fit. You have to build your house, your brick house for you. And you can look at someone else’s brick house, who they’ve been building for 10 years and wonder why their brick house doesn’t work for you. You have to build your own house and take it piece by piece.
I tell this with my clients all the time, everything that we do is an experiment. We’re trying something. If that thing doesn’t work, that’s fine. We take it out. We try something else. If it kind of works, we tweak it. Like, there is always going to be a path to what you want. You just have to create that path.
And you know, it can start with really basic things like starting at the bottom, instead of worrying about post-training meals and fats and all that stuff. Well, okay. Maybe I’m not eating enough overall. Maybe I need to start working on eating enough and then slowly start adding these things on, right? Going back to dietary fats, maybe you haven’t been eating. Maybe you have been eating that 10% of dietary fats. And before you can do anything else, because you feel like absolute dog shit, because you will if that’s what you’re consistently on, instead of trying to do everything right now, let’s just focus on getting your fats to where they need. And let’s just focus on getting your food up. You know, look at the things like, “What can I do today right now to work towards my goal, instead of being overwhelmed with the big goal and not taking the baby steps, we need to get there?”
Kristin:
100%. Amen.
Mary:
Amen. So to sum it up, dietary fats are very important. You have to have dietary fats in order to be a happy, healthy human person. And on top of that, you need them to be strong and we want it to be strong. That’s the whole point. That’s why we’re here. Otherwise, Kristen and I wouldn’t have a job. We wouldn’t do anything. You want to be strong. We need to eat fats. Generally speaking, 25% to 30% of your daily intake should be from fats.
That is going to range between what is your caloric intake? Are you eating more than normal, less than normal? Are you in a caloric deficit and in a caloric surplus? Again, this is really why having a coach is huge to your success as an athlete, because they’ll be able to look at that and help you adjust.
Kristin:
Yeah. I mean, everyone is individual, right? Like people ask me all the time. “Well, do you recommend this for your athletes or this?” And I’m like, it depends on the person. It depends on their goals. It depends on their history. It depends on a million different things. I can no longer give canned answers for anything. I can say, “Well, this is what I use for a starting point. And from there, we’re going to adjust based on how you respond, how you feel, your schedule, your life, your goals, all of that.” And it’s a constant tweaking of things until we get everything right. And for some people we get stuff right, right off the bat. Other people it takes a little bit more work and time. It’s impossible to say.
Mary:
So, if you’ve ever DM’d us and asked what do we think the proper percentage breakdown of macronutrients is? We can’t answer that because we don’t know your life. We don’t know what you do, how you train, what you’re like, we don’t know those things. And so us just giving you a blanket answer seems like bad practice on our end because we don’t know. We could tell you 50/30/20, and you could try that. And maybe it explodes and nothing works for you. And then you’re like, “Well, you told me that.” And we’re like, well, we didn’t know all these other little intricacies of your life.
Kristin:
Right. That’s something we figure out though with our clients, right? Like it’s very in-depth formulas that we use to figure that stuff out as a starting point. And then it’s just a starting point. It’s not the end-all, be-all. So that’s the challenging part.
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